'Pro-Government' Millennials Take Government Jobs, Discover They Suck, Move to the Private Sector

A few years ago, the buzz was about “how
the millennial generation is the most pro-government generation and
what this means for our future” as the
Center for American Progress put it in 2010. What it meant is
that a bunch of them took federal jobs hoping to work where the
action is, and discovered that laboring for Leviathan kind of
sucks. Now they’re streaming out of federal employment, a little
wiser for the experience.

According to the
Washington Post‘s Lisa Rein:

Six years after candidate Barack Obama vowed to make working for
government “cool again,” federal hiring of young people is instead
tailing off and many millennials are heading for the door.

The share of the federal workforce under the age of 30 dropped
to 7 percent this year, the lowest figure in nearly a decade,
government figures show.

By comparison, about a quarter of the country’s labor force is
under 30. The article adds that “employees under 30 accounted for
nearly 9 percent of those who left the government in 2013, a
significant figure given their tiny presence in the workforce.”

The reasons for the exodus include a bureaucratic and byzantine
hiring process that moves at glacial speeds, government shutdowns
and limited opportunities once hired, and the bureaucratic internal
culture.

“I had fantastic mentors and teachers in government. But there
was a big question mark about what opportunities would be available
for me,” says Meghan Gleason, 29, who left the National Institutes
of Health to take a consulting job at KPMG.

This squares with the results of a recent
Office of Personnel Management survey, which found millennials
rather less happy with their government gigs than federal employees
from older generations, though they tend to like their immediate
supervisors.

New-found disillusionment with the reality of
government extends beyond those who have actually worked in the
belly of the beast. In 2009, polling by the Pew Research Center
found that only 42 percent of millennials thought government was
“usually inefficient and wasteful.” Six in 10 Americans over 30
held that low view of the beast. But when Reason-Rupe
repeated the question earlier this year, 66 percent of
millennials thought government was “usually inefficient and
wasteful.”